Posts Tagged ‘Cultural Revolution’
Great idea for your next vacation
Posted by: Rachel in East Vs. West on March 3rd, 2010
(darkness alert)
Someone I met yesterday at a friend’s place told me she went to visit the village where she was sent as a youth during the Great (and by great I mean awesome) Cultural Revolution. Was a bit surprised that someone would choose to make such a trip so asked her if she had had good memories from the place (somewhere in Shanxi) – she hadn’t. Work was hard, her classmates and the peasants cruel, she injured her knee and was forced to cut her hair short because a pony tail wasn’t revolutionary. Why has she gone back then? apparently, it is somewhat of a trend now. Her trip (together with an old classmate and both their husbands) was organized by a travel agent who specializes in this kind of tours: In some cases it takes a lot of research to even locate the places as some names have been changed or people don’t fully remember their own experience. The woman said it was very emotional and brought back bitter memories that left her crying for hours. Me, I couldn’t help imagining the travel agency’s brochure:
Tired of the bustling city and the demands of your post-80 brats? let us take you back to your age of innocence! a once (twice, for the most) in a lifetime experience in the breath taking but cancer giving countryside of our great nation.
Feel young again breathing fresh coal and working bare foot in the snow! enjoy the hospitality of your former torturers complete with potato peels soup, creative writing workshops for writing self criticism included!
Please check our website for special international offers:
- Enjoy the tranquility of the picturesque Polish town of Auschwitzim, renowned world wide for it’s spas and saunas
- Discover the mysteries and wonders of the human body in the happy fields of Cambodia
- Special women only excursion to Eastern Congo – great ospitality in a local tribesmans’ home.
Book your next trip now at catastrophe tours – because where there is pain, there is something for us to gain!
Scars
A performance artist was sewing Chinese chracters on cabbage (don’t ask me why)
It made the Lao Taitai’s from the neighbourhood committee worried and angry: “But what will you do with the cabbage later? Would anyone still eat it?” They thought it was shamefully wasteful.
I grew up in a community where many were holocaust survivors (or holocaust victims. I’m no longer sure “survivors” is an apt name for them). It was only during the seventies that holocaust remembrance in Israel was shaping up into something respectful for victims and their families, and it was not until the eighties that the ordeals of the “Second generation” – ie children of survivors - begun to get acknowledged. Those are people who did not experience the war first hand but who have grown up in families and homes haunted by its memories. It was an important lesson for society, something that is essential in order to understand certain patterns in people’s behaviour.
It took me seven years of China experience to fully realise the obvious: That the people of the PRC are either holocaust survivors or second generation. I wonder how long it will take for public opinion here to realise that as well, let alone deal with the consequences.